


Anchorage

by standalone



Series: Fucking Political Bullshit exR Coffeeshop AU [7]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: DACA, M/M, imperfect decision-making, people matter more than rules
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-12
Updated: 2017-09-12
Packaged: 2018-12-26 21:59:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12067788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/standalone/pseuds/standalone
Summary: “Trusting a government. Trustinganyone elseto take care of you. Whodoesthat?”





	Anchorage

**__** _“Exclusionary xenophobia harshing your vibe?_

_Mellow out with a smooth brew._

_Dreamers drink free.”_

“Well, I can’t quite say I missed the place,” Grantaire mutters as he grabs at the bell hanging from the door to stop its cheery jangling. “But it does bring back the memories. She here yet?”

Enjolras vaguely recognizes a woman seated reading her phone at the far end of the cafe. “Oh, _her_! She was at the science rally, right?”

“Yeah, she comes out now and then when she’s not too busy saving the human race. I told you she used to work here with me here, right?, before she got that fancy degree and fucked off to the Zika lab. She's great. She's gonna make your heart fucking ache.”

Grantaire cozies up to the coffee counter for drinks, which come with a side of _we-never-see-you-anymore-have-you-forgotten-your-beloved-coffeeshop-roots_. When the woman at the espresso machine, whom Grantaire introduces as Flor, makes a choice remark about one of the posters taped in the big front window, and Grantaire recognizes it as his exhibition that just opened at the museum, he actually blushes, which is a fairly novel sight for Enjolras, and one he wouldn’t mind seeing again.

Blushing Grantaire glows like embers when you breathe on them. 

But they’re not here for him to learn about Grantaire, and especially not to contemplate what happens when you breathe on him.

Setting the three hot mugs down on the little table in the back, Grantaire nods his head at Enjolras and the woman, who’s sliding her phone into her back pocket, in lieu of more formal introductions. “Lilianna, Enjolras. You’ve met him, right?”

She scrutinizes Enjolras in a way he very much likes. It’s the sharpness with which a contractor ascertains that your foundation’s not going to give out. Her hair’s long and vaguely wavy; her t-shirt’s a chemistry joke. “ _Met_ might be too strong a word.”

Enjolras holds out his hand to rectify this, and she grins as they shake. “He’s your guy, right?” she asks Grantaire. 

Grantaire looks quizzically at Enjolras, to which Enjolras, taking the look to be a show of uncertainty, raises a snide eyebrow. Grantaire’s lip curls up in eventual assent. “I’d say so.”

“R said you want stories?”

“I work for—”

“Senator Lamarque, yeah, R said. Love Lamarque. I canvassed for her last time around.”

“She’ll be honored to know she had your vote.” And then he kicks himself. Now Enjolras is the one blushing. What a fucking stupid thing to say. 

“I mean, your _support_ ,” he amends, at the same time as Lilianna says, “In a manner of speaking.”

“A vote of confidence?” she says, generously. “I mean, I’m not brimming over with belief right about now, but Lamarque is legit.”

He’s not surprised by her intelligence or the earnestness, but the wry humor that underlies her words is a poignant delight.

“I’d be honored, like you said, to be one of her anecdotes.” She imitates the impassioned tone of Lamarque’s speeches. “ _Today, I want to tell you about a young woman I know, a dreamer who came here when she was just in middle school, brought by parents who spoke no English, with few belongings besides the clothes on their backs and the willingness and skill to work hard to make a better life for their family_.”

“Wow, you’re doing my job for me,” he says, swiping into the voice-recorder on his phone. “Is it okay if I record this? Obviously we don’t have to use your real name, if you’d rather.” 

She laughs. “I have literally got no secrets at this point.” He must look unsatisfied by the nebulousness of the response, because she makes an overly gracious sweep of the hand and says, “Go for it.

“Seriously,” she says. “I knew, same as anyone. I knew it was a—it’s a _risk_. To hang a big red Undocumented tag around your neck and walk yourself in the front door of the federal databases. Give them my name and address. That’s a hell of a risk.”

This was Lamarque’s worry from the get-go. Enjolras combed through her relevant 2012 correspondence and notes this weekend, and the optimism’s speckled with fears. _What happens when admin changes?_ she had typed in one email to herself. _Where’s the long-term protection?_ Later, in her follow-up notes, she said, _Pres insists: “First step is protect them_ at all _.”_

“Was it worth it?”

“I took a gamble,” she says. “You know maybe it's dumb, but it felt kinda, like, the most _American_ thing, kinda, you know? Like, _trusting a government_. Trusting _anyone else_ to take care of you. Who _does_ that?”

“You must feel betrayed.”

“I’ve never had a country want me. I mean, I know I said _trust_ , but I really meant more like, _hope_. I never _expected_ anything.” Her mouth twitches. “Doesn’t mean I’m not sad.”

“What’s up with your bro?” Grantaire asks. He is shockingly good at compassion. This is unfair. It should be no shock. Just, the long incline of his bent arm behind his head, and the way he’s leaning just a little toward her, but sideways; the way his eyes follow and linger but don’t wallow on hers when she says something serious; the usual rasp of his voice with, for the moment, no mockery scratched into it—with all these, without touching or intruding or controlling the tone, he holds the space around them and makes it hers. 

It strikes Enjolras that this mode-switch is exactly like what politicians do, even politicians like Lamarque whom he trusts to actually _mean_ the sympathy they convey, except that in a politician—even Lamarque—it’s impossible to see a show of compassion without mentally tallying the accompanying gains of political capital. In politics, every move’s calculated. Every debate’s a game.

She casts a hard look at the table, as if daring it to provoke her. “Arturo’s—well, fuck it, he’s getting ready for college. He’s supposed to move in in a couple weeks.”

“Is he gonna?”

“Oh, he’s gonna. No fucking way he doesn’t.”

Enjolras is no mathematician, but from what he knows about timeline, Arturo must be under DACA too. If his two-year renewal doesn’t go through, halfway through college he’ll plunge overnight from scholar to shadow-person, living again in the dangerous half-world of forged documents or under-the-table work that are the closest thing many immigrants have to an honest chance in this country.

What the fucking hell kind of game is this?

*

Sometimes these conversations feel exploitative—like he’s milking people for their hard-luck stories. He dreads the calls he’ll be making a week from now, to desperate people who’ve lost their homes to the coming hurricanes. Too many of them cling to the thought that if only the senator talks about them, help will come. Change will come. 

Not Lilianna.

“Look,” she says at the end, after Enjolras has already stopped the recording. She’s got to get to her job, and so do Enjolras and Grantaire, who’ve both called in late today. “I get that I’m a poster kid. But like, my best friend from high school? She got pregnant senior year and has a couple kids, and she works at a grocery store. Cause of DACA. It’s not the aspirational shit you put in speeches, maybe, but—”

“But it’s a life that’s better because of DACA.”

“An _ordinary life_ ,” she agrees. “I get sick of the focus on a select few. I mean, I get why. I’m not mad at it. But if I’m supposed to represent all the dreamers, me, with my awards and recognitions and whatnot— “ and her gestures here are so absolutely, _identically_ those of an off-the-record Maxine Lamarque “—how’s that any better than the jerks who try to lump us all together with the handful of undocumented people who are murderers? Most of us dreamers are unexceptional.”

“In the best way,” Grantaire chuckles, kissing her cheek because she’s gathering her things to head out.

“Yeah!,” she says, like this is the most obvious of conclusions. “Boring and normal. We’re great at it.”

*

Having seen Lilianna out, Enjolras and Grantaire turn back to the counter to get drinks for the road, but Grantaire gets classically waylaid by an acquaintance who is distinctly less ugly than Enjolras would like him to be, considering the familiarity with which he side-hugs Grantaire around the rib cage and lets his hand linger there while they catch up. Perfunctory introductions taken care of, Grantaire, who can certainly see that Enjolras would rather be approximately anywhere but watching this conversation, nods his chin toward the register. 

“Be over in a minute,” he says.

The line’s short. When it’s his turn, Enjolras pays an extra $20 with his coffees. “Put it toward the free drinks,” he says.

The guy waiting behind him says, “For the illegals, right?”

“No person is illegal,” Enjolras says automatically, glancing back to look the guy in the face. Mid-forties, he’d guess, big and white, bold chevron necktie, a hint of something jocose around the eyes. To the counterman, Enjolras adds, “Thanks,” and jams a couple bucks in the tip jar.

“So, I’m just wondering,” chevron-tie says—to him? to the counter-person?—in what’s clearly meant as an entree into conversation, “what’s to stop just anyone from getting that free cup? Can’t really ask for ID.” He guffaws at this. 

Enjolras’s throat is tightening, and his fists. Well, they would be fists if they weren’t occupied in clutching two cups of very hot coffee. As it is, Enjolras is grateful for the sturdiness of his travel mugs.

“Why do you even—” he begins, but the counter-person’s answering.

“Honor system,” he shrugs. “Maybe someone gets free coffee.” He shrugs again, more poetically, with arms and all. _Who cares?_ the gesture says. “You want anything?”

“It’s not like I have anything against immigrants, don’t get me wrong. But I just, I gotta say, you play by the rules. You gotta wait in line.”

“Line?” Enjolras’s voice is knife-sharp.

“Wait your turn, you know?” chevron-tie clarifies. “It’s not like you’re the only person who ever wanted to come to America. And I get it, America’s awesome, land of opportunity, all that. I don’t begrudge anyone the chance to make a better life for themself. I just think there’s a _right_ way—” he pauses for crushing emphasis with the cocksure oratorical skill of a junior Toastmaster, “—and there’s a wrong way.”

If this man were less certain of his own ingenuity in these turns of phrase, would Enjolras’s urge to punch him feel any less electrifying?

“Now see, _we’re_ playing by the rules.” Unwillingly intrigued by his apparent inclusion in the man’s “we,” Enjolras turns a glowering eye on him. What’s “we”? White men? “We came in here, waited in line.” Ah. Literal. We are cafe patrons. “If everyone can just push to the front whenever they feel like it, it’s chaos.”

Where does Enjolras even begin? 

That’s a joke of a question. 

He begins with barely-diluted rage.

“So let me get this straight,” he snaps. “Coffee shop’s an analogy for the entire quagmire of the U.S. immigration system? Yeah? Pretty direct correlation?”

“You want a thing, you come, you wait like civilized—” 

“Did your mom sneak you into this coffee-shop, past armed guards, when you were five and tell you to sit here politely in the corner forever even though you’d probably never get to order anything? Did she mention that the coffee-shop where you were born was full of stabbings? And disease? Did—”

His voice is rising. He realizes he’s also still between the man and the coffee-counter, and in petty wrath, he kind of wants to just stay here. Let this jerk wait for something for once.

But no. Because holy fuck, the asshole steps forward and shoulders him aside. A literal shoulder-check, here, in a public cafe, and Enjolras will no longer permit himself to be held back by a couple cups of boiled drink. He clunks the containers down on the counter and gestures indignantly at the guy.

“What the fuck.”

“See?” chevrons says jovially. “Sucks, right? This is a country of rules, for a reason.”

“Fuck you.” It lights up his whole body, like thousands of Christmas bulbs sparkling under his skin. It shouldn’t feel this good to be angry, should it? He keeps thinking he’s put his fury behind him, or at least that he’s exchanged it for more productive, _socially just_ fury. But he keeps being mistaken. Maybe in his heart, he’ll always be a sixteen-year-old desperately ferreting out targets for his existential anger.

He looks rather frantically down to the other end of the counter to find Grantaire entirely engrossed in conversation with that acquaintance, Montparnasse, who appears to be neither ugly nor stupid, and who is inclining his head so near Grantaire’s face that he’s practically licking Grantaire’s ear.

“Fuck. You.” This time, he says it louder—loud enough to get attention, apparently, because all of a sudden he’s at the epicenter of a spreading hush. “Fuck your shitty pretense of rationality. Fuck your wishy-washy excuses. Fuck your fucking _rules_ , because face it, no one gives a shit about rules except when the rules are on their side.” This asshole. Still up in his face, cutting off his space, trying to take it all. That’s what these jerks do, isn’t it?, take everything they can and complain they can’t have everyone else’s everything, too? 

“You’re saying you wouldn’t mind then?” the guy asks, grabbing Enjolras too firmly by the shoulders like he’s going to push him out of the way. It’s too close, his face this close not jolly but predatory, gross and intimate and overpowering. The man wields his big body like a wall; until the man decides to release his grip, Enjolras is trapped between him and the counter. “You’re cool with just anyone coming in here and taking your place, your rights, your social securi—”

Enjolras puts out his hands, knobbly and splayed against the man’s broad chest, and shoves.

And just behind him, now, is Grantaire, not plunging in to drag him away from this debacle, but near enough that Enjolras can feel him there. Grantaire’s energy pumps through the floor and into him like thick, black, liquid assurance. He sneers coolly at the staggering man before him.

“You sure you want to be doing this?” he hears Grantaire ask at his shoulder.

“Listen to your _boyfriend_ , bro,” the guy says, recovering his breath. He’s angry now, too; the sardonic emphasis on _boyfriend_ is viciously satisfying to hear. He berates Enjolras. “Man, I’m on _your side_ here, if you’d just stop to think about it for five seconds.”

Enjolras steps back and dusts off the front of his coat. “I’m sorry,” he says to the man, the attempt at contrition coming out twisted into something more like a growl than like human speech. _My side_. There’s only one way he can figure out to read that, and it makes him want to burn this country to ash. 

The man smirks nastily. “You don’t want this.”

“You have no idea—” Enjolras breathes, steadies himself, “—no _idea_ what the hell I want.”

 _Nor what my boyfriend wants. Grantaire wasn’t telling me what to_ do _, you chump. He would fucking never. He was_ asking _me a_ question _._

And god, he thinks, as the knuckles of his fist smash into the hard bar of cheekbone and _keep going_ , carrying the asshole’s head back so fast he loses balance and crashes down to the polished-concrete floor, I really, _really_ want to be doing this.

*

Unfortunately, in the hours and days to come, there is press, and the threat of charges, and though those charges will never actually materialize, there’s no evading the senator’s deep and painful disappointment. Worse, as soon as it hits the news hateful out-of-towners will converge outside the coffeeshop with red caps and picket signs and shout taunting, racist speculations about the legal status of the patrons as they enter and depart.

Fortunately, when Musichetta hears, which is basically immediately, she will organize most of the coffeeshops in town and Dreamers Drink Free will become, for a few hot-tempered weeks, the catchphrase of this sanctuary city.

*

Meanwhile, in the very short term of a rapidly-vanishing morning, the police decline to drag Enjolras in, so instead Grantaire drags him home. “We’re not going to work today,” he says, like that’s supposed to be obvious. 

“The Senator—” Enjolras protests.

“—is gonna be fucking livid. It might be a while back, but she was the best prosecutor in town. Miss her with your excuses. No way that was self-defense.”

It sinks in, in a sudden gulping lurch in his gut, that maybe Grantaire is mad at him.

“I shouldn’t have. Right? You’re mad, because that was stupid.”

“Fuck, seriously?” The ferocity of the kiss startles him. “Since when are my views on Nazi-punching anything other than _do it_?”

“But he wasn’t a... not exactly. He was kind of _reasonable_ , almost.” A creeping sense of unease. 

“Borderline reasonable’s the most dangerous shit, man. Crazy? Not too many people are trying to follow crazy on its own. But crazy backed up by almost-logic? That’s the heart of the entire goddamn corruption engine rototilling our social safety net.”

“He was just talking about _rules_. What if it is just about rules for some of them, not about people?”

“Why do people make rules?”

“I mean, it depends.”

“To fucking hold people down, asshole,” Grantaire says, kissing his neck. “Didn’t you just fucking say that?”

“Lamarque’s going to be so mad at me.”

“Yeah, that was a poor employment decision.” Grantaire’s just grinning. Just grinning at him.

“I love you.” Enjolras doesn’t know what to say until he says it, and fortunately, the right words come out.

“Pretty good punch, though,” Grantaire says. His eyes roll up to the side when he remembers things, like there’s an interesting bird hovering just over your shoulder that he’s looking at. “Bap! Real McGregor shit there.”

Enjolras is not 100% on this, but that was the guy who lost, right? Sport-fighting is dumb, and he was busy getting out ahead of the Labor Day union hall speeches. In this political wasteland, prewritten speeches are precious, rare stores for the coming winter.

“I love you,” he says again, as Grantaire grapples him onto the bed and flings himself down on top. “Holy fuck, yes. 

“There. 

“Yes, yes, yes, there. 

“Fuck, Grantaire, I love you.”

Grantaire pauses with his hand curled around Enjolras’s balls and his other hand halfway done unbuttoning his fly.

“You tryna tell me something here, Enj?”

“Don’t stop.” He wants to feel Grantaire everywhere. He wants to feel his entire body consumed in this, in goodness, in love, in the brilliant unfettered coming-together of their physical and sexual and emotional beings.

Grantaire pulls one gorgeous long drag on Enjolras’s cock, at the same time managing to shove his own pants down so that his hard naked cock presses against the ridge of Enjolras’s hip.

“You’re usually so eloquent,” Grantaire teases, his thumb teasing the head of Enjolras’s cock, apparently rubbing from Enjolras’s to his own and back. “You don’t usually say the same words four times in a row.”

His thumb comes back slick and shimmies over Enjolras till he’s leaking too. “Oh god. Yeah. Fuck. I can’t...”

“I could stop,” Grantaire says, kicking off his pants as he says so.

Enjolras licks his fingertips and slides his hand around to Grantaire’s ass.

“Wait,” he gasps, feeling the readiness with which Grantaire admits his slippery fingers. “After.”

*

They fuck face-to-face, Grantaire straddling him and Enjolras begging for more. What words he has are paltry and pedestrian, but Grantaire seems unperturbed by his loss of verbosity. Enjolras plunges into him, and in and in, like he’s trying to be so much a part of Grantaire that there’s nothing else to ever think about. Just this, just this, _just this._

Fuck, is he really saying that aloud?

Grantaire leans down then and kisses him, long and sloppy so that their mouths are as much connected as anything else. 

“Come in me,” he says, when he must feel that Enjolras is thrashing with readiness under him, so so ready to feel it all and also terrified to let go of any part of this escape.

Enjolras grabs Grantaire hard by the back of the neck and by the ass and holds his so close while he comes that he sort of worries Grantaire can’t breathe. He feels Grantaire shoot hot wet come between them, and the grunt Grantaire lets out with that, into his mouth, drags away Enjolras’s last hesitations, and he is there, floating outside of himself, everything pleasure and beauty and Grantaire.

When Grantaire rolls off him, panting for breath, he is uncharacteristically quiet. Usually after sex, Grantaire’s chatty, or affectionate, or sometimes insatiable, kissing a wrung-out Enjolras everywhere, ready for more even if they’re neither of them exactly ready for more.

But tonight, Grantaire just lies there beside him, holding his hand like he barely notices he’s doing it, and this time, it’s Enjolras who’s unprepared for any hint of distance.

He kisses frantically Grantaire’s collarbone, then his chest, then kisses down the sticky stomach, matted dark hair over soft muscle, to his cock. He licks a quick experimental lick at Grantaire’s soft cock, which twitches with the contact, then sucks it into his mouth.

“You’re not gonna—” Grantaire laughs at this, but his voice is ragged. “Fuuuck.” He’s not going to get hard right now, but there’s no denying he likes the way Enjolras is tonguing the crevices of his cock. “God, that’s so much.”

Encouraged, Enjolras starts to suck.

After a minute of this, Grantaire can’t take it any more.

“My god, Enjolras, you’re killing me. I want you so bad, I’ll fuck you right now with my fingers if you want, but I don’t think my cock’s gonna be ready for a good ten minutes at least.”

True to his word, he lubes up his fingers and works them into Enjolras, who is only now able, moaning around Grantaire, to answer the question Grantaire murmurs into his ear.

“You were gonna say something. Earlier.”

Something in him debates whether he should be _more_ or _less_ embarrassed to have this conversation while his interlocutor’s fingers are curving to take up more poignant and extremely compelling space inside his ass. He lands on not caring. This is everything he wants, and perhaps the depth of his desire is embarrassing, but who cares if it’s embarrassing if you’re getting it?

“I said it, didn’t I?” he says back, grinding down hard on the fingers. Holy hell, this is good. It’s everything—oh shit. He keeps thinking that, doesn’t he? That this is everything? That it’s an escape? That if he can feel it enough, it’ll last forever?

He freezes. “Oh shit.

“I’m sorry.”

Grantaire, of course, freezes too, and at the _sorry_ , he seems to lock up, waiting.

“I’m so fucking stupid about this. Fuck. I feel this desperation to love you, to fall in love, to be in love, to care so much about something that I can’t look away and see the devastation and idiocy. I’m sorry.”

Thank god, Grantaire no longer looks like a cast-out statue. He’s thawing into some mix of confusion and amusement. Enjolras blunders on.

“You deserve more. You _are_ more—to me, I mean, you’re a _ton_ , I love you, that is not under a modicum of dispute—” and Grantaire is suddenly smug, eyes beaming in that deceptively hard face, “—wait, are you... you didn’t _know that_?” how on earth is it possible that this has not been obvious to Grantaire forever? but apparently it hasn’t, because this expression he’s wearing now is quite possibly the most luminous thing Enjolras has ever seen, and doesn’t that just make it all the more essential that he say this last: “—but in this moment, isn’t it a disservice to you to fling myself at you just because you’re the most convenient person to plug this gaping hole in my heart?”

It is. It absolutely is. It’s not Grantaire’s job to relieve him of the unliftable weight of the world, even for minutes. It’s not his job to make Enjolras believe in goodness again.

“Fuck no,” Grantaire says, pressing deeper into him. “I love filling your holes, Enjolras.” 

*

In the shower later, Grantaire says, with little bravado and littler volume, that he loves Enjolras, too. It’s not a relief, exactly, but a bunch of bulbs inside Enjolras twinkle to life at that. Who knew they were even there?

He says it louder that evening, when he returns home from an afternoon at work to find Enjolras deleting and rewriting and deleting statements for the senator after she flat-out refused his first one, the one in which she was supposed to announce that her brawling speechwriter had been dismissed, effective immediately. 

“I love you,” Grantaire says, “but this is not that fucking hard. _Although I do not condone my speechwriter’s impeccable fisticuffs, he’s great, there are like twelve storms brewing, and I’m keeping him._

“Got that down?”

**Author's Note:**

> There's so much more to say than I will ever manage, even when I allow myself the freedom to eschew any kind of real and logical narrative in favor of my favorite things: social justice, punching, and fucking. Sometimes the thought of having an actual story is just too much. Thanks for bearing with me.
> 
> Better days will come. They must.


End file.
